Tales of the Huai-Si Strange

The Great Sheng Dynasty had enjoyed peace for so long that its accumulated ills multiplied. To the north, the Shuo Kingdom watched like a tiger; to the west, the Rong and Di raided the borders. Within, factions schemed against one another, and local strongmen grew too powerful. Huaizhou, the crossroads of five provinces and the key to the royal capital, was the very hub of the Nine Provinces' dragon qi. Shen Du rose from the bottom of Huaizhou's canal-transport world. Entering the Bureau of the Mysterious and Strange through his mastery of the investigation of things, he worked with the old craftsman Wu and the female scribe Lin Wan to handle supernatural cases across the land. Beginning with the demon-bat case at the Xuanwu Temple in Huaizhou, he obtained Lingyunzi's notebooks and glimpsed the secret of the dragon lairs—a century earlier, the master geomancer Lingyunzi had been ordered to survey the Nine Provinces' dragon lairs, setting dragon-guiding stakes to channel the earth's qi and secure the dynasty's fate. But Dai Xuansu, director of the Heavenly Mechanism Institute, secretly converted the dragon-guiding stakes into a dragon-trapping formation, intending to lock down the dragon qi and use arcane arts to forcibly prolong a decaying dynasty. Northern Shuo took advantage of Great Sheng's internal and external troubles to invade south in force. Amid the flames of war, the dragon qi seethed, and spirits and monsters ran rampant across the Nine Provinces. In the course of investigating cases on orders, Shen Du gradually uncovered the truth of how Lingyunzi had been murdered for refusing to hand over the complete map of the dragon lairs. On one side, the Heavenly Mechanism Institute defied heaven to lock down the dragon; on the other, the Shuo Kingdom coveted the dragon qi and sought to seize Huaizhou. Shen Du was caught between the three forces of the court, the foreign enemy, and the jianghu. From seeking truth to seeking justice to seeking the Way, he ultimately broke the Nine-Lair Dragon-Trapping Formation and fought Dai Xuansu in a decisive battle where the Huai and Si rivers meet, releasing the dragon qi to return to the world. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Tales of the Huai-Si Strange — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠